i'm doing a half marathon in april. that is the longest distance i will ever run. i just have no desire to do a full and it sounds miserable. the half is more of a mental challenge than physical. i really hate running and just wanted to see if i could push myself to do it, otherwise, my normal would be to run 1.5 miles at most just for some light conditioning.
You could just pay a homeless dude to punch you in the face and save some time.
Time doesn't matter, a mile is still a mile.
I did a half marathon last year without doing any running prior. I normally do a lot of trail running, but wasn't running last year. I finished in 2:30ish. Slow but still finished. Since I wasn't running at all prior, my feet hurt like hell for a week after. Lesson for me is don't run a half without any training.
I've done a half. From what I understand, a full marathon is pure mental agony as most bodies tend to crash when they reach the high teens / early twenty mile marks.
In my experience, the full marathon is like 10x more mental than a half even though it's just 2x the distance.
1/2 marathons are fun, i love the feeling of being properly prepared and being able to step on the gas and keep it on for the whole race. Marathons require much more pacing, the 1/2, I feel like I can play with it much more (chasing faster people, trying to stay with faster packs as long as i can, going for broke for the final 5/8/10k...) I try not to play around too much in marathons, just manage everything so I can stay "fresh" as long as possible....cracking at 15 miles is brutal, starting to feel like shit at mile 23-24 isn't so bad.
I actually know a guy who shit himself because he was trying to qualify for Boston and was exactly on his split goals so he didn't want to stop and risk losing the precious minutes. He qualified and went on to do like 2:49 at Boston lol, he says it was worth it.
I understand what you are saying but for me running half is mentally challenging enough because I dislike running so much, haha. Full, yeah not ever for me.
I hear you. Honestly, I'd much rather run a 50 mile trail race than a road marathon any day. Trail running especially mountainous stuff is so much more fun than pounding on the streets for 3 hours.
I could see myself maybe trying something like that someday, but yeah not 3-4 hours on pavement.
You should!!! It's a totally different sort of race. Marathons have shitloads of people, all sorts of theatrics, announcers, raffles, all sorts of bullshit.
Ultras usually start in some small town somewhere with like ~20-100 participants so after the first several miles you are often all by yourself. Aid stations are like 10 miles apart instead of every mile, the scenery is better and it's a strange feeling when you are racing and it starts getting dark. It's actually something I miss a lot. When I get back to the states, I want to get full on back into iltra running.
yeah, i have 3 or 4 friends at work that do this stuff so it would be easy to get into it.
You're lucky. There's basically none of it in Asia. There are a few races here and there but there's basically nothing in the way of a "scene" for it.